Christmas Past  Christmas Present

Diane Alden
Dec. 24, 2000

Americans have a Christmas legacy. I know for a fact this legacy lives today
in towns and rural areas all over these United States. In this country today, Americans
are quietly feeding the hungry and clothing the naked. Some unfortunates may fall through
the cracks, but it isn't because no one cares. If there is a poor man or woman today who
has nothing and is lonely, once it is known, America will give that individual what is
needed and then some.

While some Americans spend themselves into credit card hell, others look at the season
as a time to remember. Remembrances are often difficult these days because we must
overlook a mountain of political correctness in this oddball world of Grinches who would
steal it from us.

We must endure as some cities and individuals call a Christmas tree a "unity"
tree and the Christmas season is referred to as "sparkle" season. In some towns
mangers are not allowed on public property and some towns do not even put up lights. In
Oregon there are towns that have essentially banned Christmas and don't allow Christmas
trees on public property.

The United Way publishes a Christmas newsletter that sings the praises of Kwanzaa and
Hanukkah and relegates Christmas to a few lines about how Christ, the namesake of the
season, was not even born at this time of year. It continues that many Christmas customs,
such as the Christmas tree, are pagan in origin.

That may be, but the German immigrants who brought the tradition to America would
probably wonder that the evergreen, the symbol of joyful and hopeful anticipation, should
be relegated to nothing but pagan pantheism. The custom of the Christmas tree has often
brought people together and has been used as a focal point of celebration.

The intolerant attitude toward customs with a Christian connotation keeps growing every
year. We have exchanged the Christmas traditions of generations for the lifeless and
soulless politically correct world and spiritless celebration we have today.

But the anti-Christmas attitude, I believe, is not the attitude of most Americans.
Christmas is a celebration that brings us together in community more than any other. We
have stories and food and gifts as our way of celebrating our humanity and the birth of
the Christ. The stories of Christmas in almost each and every case speak of the
transcendence of our limited natures to something approaching the divine.

My favorite Christmas story is "A Christmas Carol" by Charles Dickens. But
some Christmas stories are not as familiar as Scrooge and Tiny Tim, and that is too bad,
because they are uniquely American and should be customarily told to children to pass on
to their children. Here are three of those stories.

Christmas At Valley Forge

One of the most famous paintings in patriotic Americana is "Prayer at Valley
Forge." The famous picture depicting Washington on his knees in the snow at
Christmastime has given heart to many. It depicts the cold he must have felt, and it also
implies the weight of the future of a young country falling on one man's shoulders. Valley
Forge has come to be associated with sacrifice and hope in the face of adversity.

Washington chose Valley Forge for a winter encampment because Congress had hidden
thousands of barrels of flour, horseshoes and equipment in the hills near Valley Forge.
The temperatures that winter of 1777 were hovering near 6 degrees above zero. The troops
were ill-clothed and certainly ill-housed.

Following the setback at Brandywine and Germantown, plus the loss of Philadelphia to
the British, Washington held a meeting with his generals and they chose Valley Forge as
their winter encampment. It was not chosen so much for strategic reasons but because
Pennsylvanians demanded the army camp close to Philadelphia in order to prevent the
British from raiding that state's inland farms.

If the Continental Army did not aver to these demands, Pennsylvania vowed to stop
sending troops, supplies and money, so Valley Forge was chosen over other potential sites.

A morning report of December 23, 1777, listed 8,200 men as fit for duty and a few
thousand others sick. Shelter was built from tree trunks and the branches used for
firewood. Washington lived in a tent like the others vowing to share the hardships until
the troops had shelter.

A heavy snowfall on Christmas Day forced him to rent Isaac Potts' house nearby. He
invited his generals for Christmas dinner and they ate sparsely and drank water. On New
Year's Day, however, every man received a pint of rum and for one day spirits were high.

As it is today, part of their lack of necessities was due to the bureaucracy of
Pennsylvania's ruling elite. The men were ill-clothed because Pennsylvania bureaucrats
overruled purchases of goods and clothes because they wanted the procurement to be handled
by the "clothier general."

The following Christmas, Washington was preparing to take Trenton, N.J., a battle that
would become one of the major turning points of the war. On Boxing Day, the day after
Christmas, Washington and his men struck Trenton. He did not lose one man in that battle,
although several of his close friends lost their lives in the days and weeks that
followed. They chose Christmastime to strike because they understood that they could
surprise a superior force. Crossing the Delaware in the dead of winter at Christmas has
come to symbolize one of those bold acts that led to victory.

George Washington resigned his commission as general of the Continental Army on
December 23, 1783. "I consider it an indispensable duty to close this last solemn act
of my official life by commending the interests of our dearest country to the protection
of Almighty God and those who have the superintendence of them into His holy
keeping."

I wonder what he would say about "sparkle season," what the good people in
some places in Pennsylvania and elsewhere now call Christmas season, and the fact it is
now politically incorrect to mention the Almighty in most public places. The reason for
the season is forgotten or relegated to a side issue, but we now have Kwanzaa or sparkle
season. Christmas is relegated to the state of silence in the land of political
correctness.

What would the PC crowd do with Thomas Jefferson, who ordered copies of the New
Testament distributed at government expense to Indian tribes in the Louisiana Purchase
"so that they learn the moral code crucial to the prospects of liberty"?

Corps of Discovery

In 1802, Thomas Jefferson commissioned the Army Corps of Discovery to explore the newly
acquired Louisiana Purchase. His goal was to find a water passage to the Pacific and unite
the continent from sea to sea. Lewis and Clark and their expeditionary force spent their
second Christmas on the trail at Fort Mandan in the Dakotas. In celebratory fashion the
captains handed out dried apples, pepper and extra flour to the men. Just before dawn the
men rushed in and greeted the captains with gunfire. The outgoing and jolly Capt. Clark
presented each man in the party a glass of brandy, hoisted the American flag and everyone
had another glass of brandy.

On Christmas Day the following year the corps had reached the Pacific Ocean in Oregon
and holed up at what they called Fort Clatsop. Again the men woke the captains with
gunfire and song. and Pvt. Whitehouse gave Clark a pair of moccasins he had made. Stephen
Ambrose in the book "Undaunted Courage," which chronicles the expedition,
relates that "... Sacagawea gave [Clark] two dozen white weasel tails, and Captain
Lewis gave him a vest, drawers, and socks. ... The celebration didn't last long. It was a
wet and disagreeable day, and, as Clark recorded, 'We would have spent this day the
nativity of Christ in feasting, had we anything either to raise our spirits or even
gratify our appetites, our dinner consisted of poor [spoiled] elk, so much spoiled that we
ate it through sheer necessity. Some spoiled pounded fish and a few roots.' "

At Fort Clatsop the captains' accommodations featured a fireplace with a chimney. The
enlisted men's rooms had fire pits dug in the floors and smoke vented through the holes in
the roof. The low pressure weather systems, however, made for poor draft and the men had
to rush to build chimneys. Two latrine pits were dug outside the gates of the fort. On
Christmas Day the fleas moved in with the men and stayed for the duration of their
encampment at Fort Clatsop.

Only a few years after the explorers' triumph chronicling and mapping the northern part
of Jefferson's purchase, Meriwether Lewis committed suicide. For almost a hundred years,
hardly anyone recalled or honored the two explorers, and it was well into the 20th century
before historians and botanists understood what they had accomplished. And in the midst of
their exploration and with hardships that modern man cannot begin to fathom, they still
found time to honor Christmas and the person for whom it is named.

In America's Christmas past there was a unity of spirit about the season. Those who
came before us would not understand why, to some, Christmas is now a dirty word.

I Heard the Bells

My friend, mentor and former editor Ralph Heller died this year. One of Ralph's
favorite stories was the one he told at Christmastime. I can't tell it as well as Ralph,
but you will get the gist.

The great American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote a poem that, since his death,
has been set to music and has become one of America's favorite carols. That poem was
"I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day." Longfellow wrote the poem on a Christmas
Eve during the Civil War. He was alone that evening and distracted because his son was off
fighting in the war. Someone knocked on the door; it was a messenger with a letter from
the Secretary of War notifying Longfellow that his son had been killed.

Later that night Longfellow heard the bells which rang at midnight. With his heart
overflowing with grief, he sat down and wrote the lines:

I heard the bells on Christmas Day
Their old familiar carols play
And wild and sweet the words repeat
Of peace on earth, good will to men.

Happy to know he could still write in spite of his grief, he continued:

I thought of how this day had come,
The belfries of all Christendom
Had rung so long the unbroken song
Of peace on earth, good will to men.

As the night passed, grief gave way to anger and bitterness, reflected in the third
stanza:

Then in despair I bowed my head,
"There is no peace on earth," I said,
"For hate is strong and mocks the song
Of peace on earth, good will to men."

Longfellow did not sleep that night but sat numb and overcome at his loss. At dawn the
bells from the church steeples began to ring again. Moved by the new day and the ringing
of the bells, Longfellow finished his poem with the last stanza. As Ralph Heller
reflected, it is "one of the greatest affirmations of faith in Western
literature":

Then pealed the bells now loud and deep:
"God is not dead nor doth He sleep.
The wrong shall fail, the right prevail
With peace on earth, good will to men."

Ralph completed the story with a quote from Russian writer Stefan Trofinmovitch, who
saw obsessive secularism as mankind's biggest challenge: "The one essential condition
of human existence is that man should always be able to bow down before something
infinitely great. For if men are deprived of the infinitely great, they will not go on
living and will die of despair."

Another Ralph, one Ralph Waldo Emerson, reflected on the condition of the American
soul, and it is too bad his observations and advice have been thrown into the politically
correct ash heap. Emerson said:

" ...our system of education ... is a system of despair. ... We do not speak to
the divine sentiments in man; we do not try. We adorn the victim [student] with manual
skill, his tongue with languages, his body with inoffensive and comely manners. So have we
cunningly hid the tragedy of limitation and inner death we cannot avert ... the human mind
now labors in want of faith."

Some in the American world today want to totally rid us of all notions of the spiritual
and profound. They babble about separation of church and state oblivious to the fact that
such a separation is nowhere to be found in the Constitution but rather is a judicial
hybrid and a creation of those who hate or choose to misrepresent or misunderstand all
religions. The ones who speak of "freedom from" have it wrong. The Founders only
had in mind that no state religion should be instituted.

Yet we do have a state religion now. That religion is secularism and materialism and
political correctness. It is a poor substitute for the faith that was the engine for the
greatest republic, and once home of liberty, in the history of mankind.

In our day we have pale and inconsequential straw men, quasi-religions and
celebrations. These offer no joy or love or passion. These replacements for Christmas are
the result of small, intolerant and obtuse minds. They give us Kwanzaa and sparkle season
to replace the shining time with a glorious reaffirmation of the faith of our fathers.

Those worldly wise who will not allow or tolerate Christmas and its symbols are
building a little world of airless and sterile and fragile towers. It is too bad the
architects of this new environment are blind to the greatness of one of the world's most
compelling and important philosophies. From Judaism to Christianity, those founding
beliefs and principles have been our guidon for over 200 years.

No matter what the new order or political correctness requires or demands, Christmas
will never go away. After the fancies and fashions of the moment have passed, Christmas
will live on in the heart of man as it has for 2,000 years.

So to all of you, believers and nonbelievers, I wish you well. I wish you the joys of
the season and hope for tomorrow, because in the final analysis that is what Christmas is
about.

Diane Alden is a
research analyst with a background in political science and economics. Her work has
appeared in the Washington Times as well as NewsMax.com, Etherzone, Enterstageright,
American Partisan and many other online publications. She also does occasional radio
commentaries for Georgia Radio Inc. Her e-mail address is wulfric8@bellsouth.net